Github Integrations Directory and CircleCI Mobile Support

It has been a very busy week in the world of mobile CI and CD. There’s a growing need for mobile support (both iOS and Android) with the announcement of GH Integrations Directory. Here is what we are doing to keep up with the iOS builds demand.

We’re Making Room

We are always happy to welcome new customers, and part of our work is planning for additional capacity, which ebbs and flows. Adding additional capacity for Linux is quite straight forward with our AWS deployment—it’s just a few key strokes (and a few more credit card payments). Increasing capacity for iOS, however, takes a bit more. This is because our iOS builds run on physical Apple hardware, which we need to purchase, provision, and rack in a datacenter. We were already in the process of racking more Apple hardware to enable more iOS builds, and we expect to have enough capacity online by early next week to support most of the users we are seeing for the first time.

How To Get Access

As we enable OS X support on case-by-case basis, please reach out to us via the chat window on CircleCI.com with the name of the GitHub org or account that you would like to run the builds under, plus the approximate number of builds you will be running per day and the timezone your iOS development team is located in. Once we have that information, we’ll do our best to give you the access to iOS builds as soon as possible.

It’s Worth The Wait

We approach the iOS builds with the same level of love that our Linux builds get—every build container is created right before the build starts and is destroyed immediately after all commands have finished to ensure maximum security and reliability of the builds. In the iOS containers, we pre-install Xcode versions 6.3.1, 6.4 and 7.0 and we also bundle in the tools like Homebrew and cocoapods to make sure you have all the dependencies for your project available and configured properly in the build. Once the iOS beta is enabled for your organization, your builds will be up and running within minutes. Other features you might have seen in the Linux builds, like encrypted environment variables, deployments and artifacts storage, are also available for iOS builds.

We at Circle are very excited that you are here, and we look forward to serving you well!

If you have questions for us on this or any other topic, never hesitate to reach out at sayhi@circleci.com.

(Already cleared for iOS or Android? Here are some docs to get you started. Moving from Ship.io? We’ve put together a migration document to help)